Waterloo Young Professionals

Introduction
Welcome (back) to Money Matters, a weekly-ish discussion group relating to topics of personal finance and financial education/literacy.

Attendees are encouraged to share their personal experiences related to finances to help others learn and achieve their financial goals.
It is planned to repeat all the sessions from last year for those new to the group in the last 6 months, or those who couldn't attend.

Topic
The topic will be Financial Independence / Retirement Planning.
Whether you want to retire early or be financially secure or independent at any age, this takes planning and preparation.
We will discuss the information we need to gather, and the steps we likely should take to be financially confident when we stop receiving income from work.

Discussion Prompts / Questions

• Have you heard of the "4% Rule" and do you know what it refers to?
• What is "sequence of returns risk", and why is it so important in retirement planning?
• Have you tracked your spending for any period of time? Do you know how much you spend per year?
• Regular payments during retirement: Government benefits (CPP, OAS, GIS), pensions, annuities
• Retirement withdrawal strategies are numerous and involved to numerically compare against one another
• Do you think you have to retire "to" something, instead of just retiring "from" work? Do you think this is different for different people?

Additional Materials
Some materials relating to this topic are: